We the People?  🌻🌻🌻

Duck, Duck, Dick: In 1986 Geraldo Rivera who had once won awards for his reports on the horrific treatment of patients at the NY State run Willowbrook institution for people with disabilities was in a rut. To reinvigorate his then flailing career, he hosted a much hyped, widely watched television special centered on the live opening of Al Capone’s vault.  Thirty million viewers tuned in expecting to learn that the vault contained some combination of valuables and corpses.  The event turned out to be a bust as the vault contained only dirt and a few empty bottles. Following in Rivera’s no-news is still news tradition, over the weekend Elon Musk hosted a similarly ridiculous event. Instead of Rivera, this time the sewer straddling reporter was one-time award-winning Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi, the media outlet was Twitter, and the subject was the “corrupt,” “leftist” decision making process that resulted in Twitter squelching the NY Post’s reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run up to the 2020 presidential election.  Though the topic was a presidential candidate’s troubled son rather than a convicted criminal mastermind, the results of this so-called “expose” was pretty much the same. Despite all the hype, Taibbi’s report was a bust.  Instead of revealing a globalist plot, the internal Twitter emails revealed a decision process that was thoughtful and somewhat anguished; one that concluded that absent verification about the laptop’s origins and over concerns that the laptop could have been a Russian plant, the story should be blocked.  That conclusion meant that Twitter also blocked the sharing of Hunter Biden “dick pics,” which were also on the laptop, content that the Biden campaign had requested not be shared.  Notably Biden’s team had no control over Twitter, he wasn’t in office at the time and requests like his were not unusual, campaigns on both sides of the aisle make them.   Twitter later admitted that they should have let the story fly, pun intended. Unfortunately for democracy, the key difference between today and 1986 is Trump and his canny, evil ability to inflame his base, twisting facts to make everything appear to be a plot against him so naturally the former president, current presidential candidate seized on Twitter’s weekend reveal of the vault of “dick pics” as “proof” that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.  He went ballistic on his social Truth Social platform, calling for the termination of the Constitution to overturn the “False & Fraudulent” 2020 election, so that he, the “RIGHTFUL WINNER”  could be returned to office because a “Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles.”  Trump, given the winner take all nature of the Republican primaries, really could be his party’s candidate again in 2024.  He just called for the suspension of the Constitution so that he can complete his coup and as usual, most GOP politicians are too afraid of the consequences of condemning him.  Of course, one of those most fearful is Speaker wannabee Kevin McCarthy, who last week promised to open “his” first session of Congress with an out loud reading of the Constitution, the one that Trump wants eliminated.

Lights Out: The House is now in possession of six years of Trump’s tax filings.  If this weekend’s Forbes article is right, that information will likely reveal that during his one term as president, Trump failed to disclose a $19.8 million debt to Daewoo, a South Korean company with a history of ties to North Korea, the country run by his good friend Kim Jong Un. Not related to Trump’s financials or his propensity to sidle up to dictators, but very disturbing nevertheless, the FBI and local officials are investigating a power outage in Moore County, North Carolina believed to have been caused by intentional and targeted attacks on substations.  The outage has left 40,000 customers without power.  Though the motive for the attack is still not clear, there are suggestions that the attackers may have been trying to disrupt a scheduled drag show event.  Who knows, maybe combining targeted hate with a leader/hero who promotes dissension and bigotry actually leads to dire outcomes?  Getting back to Twitter where hate tweets and COVID misinformation are more welcome than ever, the company is still in business, but it’s advertising revenues are way down and that much hyped threat from Apple that it was seriously considering removing Twitter from its App store, that was just another diversion orchestrated by the Chief Twit.  Diversion or not, the Chief Twit, who once said that Twitter should be a neutral platform was either lying or has changed his mind as he and his platform are now anything but neutral which could explain why so many Republican politicians are now among his biggest supporters.  It’s also hard not to notice that his staged Hunter Laptop reveal, bust or not, took place in the run up to Tuesday’s Georgia Senate runoff.   

Midterm Madness:  Regarding that runoff, tomorrow is election day in Georgia. According to the oddsmakers and the more respectable pollsters, Senator Raphael Walker is likely to beat the ex-football player, multiple personality guy Herschel Walker by a smidge or maybe even a little bit more.  That said, it’s not like the pollsters or even the oddsmakers are always correct so we’ll have to wait until the polls close and maybe a bit longer to find out who gets to go to Washington.  Keep in mind that depending on when Democratic leaning early votes are dumped into the count, there could be an early “mirage” effect.